Month: December 2016

Not all parents know the power of positive thinking and how with negative thoughts and attitudes
self sabotage our lives leading us in to worries ,phobias and ultimately in to depression.Personally i myself grew up as a Prince of Negative Thoughts and Attitudes as far as my memory goes in to my childhood.Worrying and anger were the Top negative issues i had growing up.I realized how these negative attitudes were playing their hand in keeping my life miserable and how i needed to think Positively to make my life better when i started reading some books on Positive thinking.I gradually changed myself from being a person with negative attitude to beome a positive person.How to change a kid’s negative attitude

I understand that we are here to learn about how to change our kids negative thoughts and attitudes and not to learn about myself.But if you are not seeing what i am doing here,i need you to understand that,if your child has negative attitude the first step is to make sure that your child didn’t inherit the negativity from you.In that case you have to start working on yourself and change yourself first and your child will pick up the positive glow from you and will change his or her negative ways eventually.

But if you are a Positive person with a nice attitude and your children have recently picked up unwanted negative attitudes from others we can easily change the child’s negative behaviour with storytelling.

First things first.Negative Behaviour or negative attitude is such a broad term.First we have to single out specifically what kind of negative attitude you want to change in your child and you have to tell the story to attack that particular trait.

Lets do a case study of how i helped my son with a story.
My son was kind of saying that he had no friends at school and at play.I wanted to help him out and i started to observe him while he is at play with his playmates.He was constantly getting angry at the other kids.I started to observe a pattern in the fights he picked up and found the root cause of his problem.He was making fun of the other kids and was teasing other kids.For example he would do something in play and say ‘I am the first,you are the last’ and the other kids hated him.If the other kids were better than him in doing something he got angry and went mad.When he came complaining to me i said “Let me tell you a story”.
The following is the actuall story i told him.I am sure that you can do better than me but i have shared my story for you just in case you need it and find it helpful.

Outcome:To persuade him not to make fun of other and mind his own business.

Story: Once there lived a boy who runs fast.He was the fastest runner in his class.One day the boy and his classmate were playing in the school ground and they were about to run a race when a new boy asked him if he can join the race.So all the three ran the race.Our boy was leading the race and he turned back and began to make fun of his classmates who is comming behind.He said ‘I am the first,you are last!”
When he finally looked ahead of the race track he noticed that the new boy who had joined them has now gained the lead and he is nearing the finish line.The New boy won the Race.Everyone congratulated the new boy and they asked him the secret of winning the race.
The boy turned to his classmate and said “If i had not turned back and mocked at you i would have won the race.i
was irritating you and i lost both your fiendship and the Race.
-The End-
Now,if you may say that this story is ordinary and it will never work in changing the child’s negative attitude of making fun of others.But it worked in a large way with my child and you may also understand how it worked when you hear me explaing how it worked.

Someone once asked me..”Why can’t you just tell your son to stop making fun of others and take of his own business directly.Why you need a story?”.I didn’t because that will not not help to change his attitude.If you are a parent you would have already tried telling and yelling commands directly at your child and one thing i bet you learned well is that it doesn’t work out that way.Why doesn’t it work?There is a psychological truth behind it.The consious mind of people does not like it when others tell them how to think and what to do.But when you tell a story,it is a metaphor.They have to go deep inside their mind and try wearing the character on them.They get the message unconsiously.It will get much more complicated if i try to explain in detail but i want you to come out with different stories for different problems you want to help your child with.And you that storytelling helps when you tell a good story and it works.

Often times we will be in situations where we won’t be feeling comfortable discussing some topics with some people.In such situations we may need to change the subject of the conversation away from what that makes you feel uncomfortable and towards topics that will give you a upper hand.

There are a whole lot of NLP power phrases available,which you can learn,to successfully do this in any conversation in your day to day life.Once you learn some of these and add it in your Toolkit the possibilities are Endless here…you can apply it in your Personal,Business or in your day to day conversations with strangers.We can successfully change the direction of a conversation towards the subject or topic you want it to Proceed but first you have to decide if you are going to do this the soft way or with authority.

The REDEFINE Pattern is a NLP technique that allows you change the topic of a conversation away from the topic you are not comfortable with authority and style.

The redefine pattern goes like this ‘The issue is not about ‘their subject’ but about ‘your subject’.

If you don’t understand the hang of this language pattern yet,stay with me,and you will realize the power of the REDEFINE pattern when i explain it with an example in a Business Scenario.

Scenario:
You are a Team leader and you are assigned a difficult Project that needs to be completed in the next two weeks.
You arrange a Team meeting and break this news to your team mates and they revolt saying how difficult the task is or how it is impossible to achieve in the given deadline.

Your team members are struck in a negative routine finding reasons why they cannot do the given task while you have organized this meeting to discuss how to plan this task.If you are going to say nothing your team members will eventually persuade the other members and even you to start thinking of ways to escape the task.But Luckily you know the REDEFINE pattern and know exactly what to say to steer them away from their negativity and Towards the subject that need to be addressed.

Picture this…..You stand up and say….
“The issue is not about the difficulty of this task but about how we are about to plan to complete it within the deadline,for which we all are getting paid .”

Just in case you don’t realize what you have done here
….You have closed all the doors and opened the only door to the room where you want to lock them in.Now you have indirectly suggested that the only thing that you are going to talk in this meeting is about the plans for achieving the given task and not about anything else.

Now that you have started to understand the power of the REDEFINE pattern to change the subject and direct the conversation to the topic you want to talk about.

Let’s see a variation of this technique in the sales scenario.You are a salesman and the customer is stalling from buying the product ,even though he likes it because he thinks it is overpriced.

You say….
“The Real Problem here is not that this Product is costing you a few extra bucks more but that it is exactly what you wanted for your home.”